Maria Valtieri
Princess Maria Valtieri is a princess of Camlorn, and the youngest of the four Valtieri siblings. Neither the heir nor even the spare, Maria has elevated the art of being a child forgotten to entirely new heights; and, childishly disillusioned with her family, this state of affairs almost satisfies her, freeing her as it does to make off on her next grand (and thoroughly reckless) adventure with her lowborn paramour, Emmer Hawksly. That it falls to her older brother, Claude, to pick up the pieces after her and to shield her from their father's wrath, concerns the young princess not one bit. __FORCETOC__ Appearance Cursed with the most unfortunate combination of both her parents' physiques, Maria has both her father's towering height, and the slender grace of her mother - leaving her, on balance, nothing more than a reed in the wind, so ready to snap. She is the full and whole awkwardness of a woman in bloom, but not quite yet blooming: just a little too lanky; just that little bit clumsy; just a little unsure, of herself more than anything. None of which is to say that the young princess is in any way lacking; merely that hers is the charm of a misplaced fawn, stumbling round the castle halls. With her thick and much-cherished mane of dark brown (curling proudly all the way to her waist), and her rounded, guileless features, and her wide, startling-green eyes, Maria calls to mind more (and how appropriate) the poor freerider's sweetheart than the celestial beauties of Bretic chant and legend; that is more her sister's province, and she would find little purchase there. Her wardrobe is a princess's wardrobe: dresses heaped upon dresses, for every occasion, many of which are in some or other shade of the much-reviled family blue. Maria's own personal favourites are bright, chirpy things of greens and especially yellows - some gifts from Daggerfall, some the fruits of her own labours and ingenuity (i.e. obstinate refusal to be satisfied by anything but). Biography Maria hasn't lived long, or enough, to make for a compelling story; she's almost too young, after all, to remember well even her mother or her mother's passing, or anything else from that one fateful year that tore High Rock, and the House Valtieri, asunder. It was a pain, of course, and a great one - but for the youngest, it will always be just that little bit muted; the difference between a longing ache for what could have been over that for what had been. She grew up, instead, under her sister's wing, and clinging to her for all the needs a child might have of their mother. And when Kelmena left, the littlest Valtieri princess was left with no wings at all. Oh, there were letters, delivered from faraway Daggerfall by the Queen's own confidante; and for as long as she remained a good child, a shy child, those letters were the only ones who remembered she was at all there - or so it seemed to her then, and seems still now. But then, how could an absent father, an absent sister who lived only on parchment, how could two pillocks so absorbed, one in his schemes and the other in his own sullenness, how could any of that ever be enough? It wasn't; so she looked elsewhere. First, she looked for friends among the maids and the wee serving-girls; and they were, most of them, good and sweet to her, until it emerged that they, all but one, valued those who paid their wages and kept the roof over their heads more than the affections of one wayward princess. And so Maria - one true companion richer, and feeling encouragingly like a fairytale - resolved to look for someone with whom her affections might hold more sway. And she found him; oh, did she find him. A freerider's son, himself fated to one day be a freerider, in the wrong place at the right time. What a gloriously inauspicious match they made; what elaborate ways of continuing their inappropriate dalliance they've devised, again and again, for near a year now. And what a horrid fate - though neither has once stopped to consider it, - what a horrid fate it would bring upon the both of them if her father were to learn that she, his own daughter, has taken to a life lived tiptoeing the edge of what is deemed good and appropriate; and taken to it with such dizzying love as she's hardly ever felt for anything before. Talents Maria is, put bluntly, an altogether terrible princess. She cannot crochet, and her curtseys and manners are in dire need of work she'll never put into them; sometimes it seems like the only reason why the littlest Valtieri is capable of maintaining some modicum of propriety at court is because of her shyness with crowds, especially crowds full of grouchy, disapproving old men. It would, in fact, be quite the challenge to come up with anything, any useful skill or talent, that might hold or interest Maria. The best that could be said of her is that the young princess has a wild and sprawling imagination. In another life, she might've been an excellent bard; alas, an ambition singularly inappropriate for a scion of one of High Rock's noblest houses. Category:Characters Category:Breton Category:Nobility Category:Camlorn